First successful BitTorrent prosecution

A 23-year-old man from Virginia is the first person to be successfully convicted of helping to run a BitTorrent P2P node. Grant Stanley has been sentenced to five months in jail and five months home detention for his part in managing the BitTorrent node known as Elite Torrents. Stanley was also fined $3,000 and given three years probation. ...more

Hotmail Hack a damp squib

A lot of hard work to read someone's spam. Reports that hackers can break into Hotmail accounts with ease have been put down as "misleading", according to Security News Portal. Earlier this week hacking site Root-Core posted a program that enabled Hotmail users to scan for messages held by other accounts. ...more

Mozilla previews new website

The Mozilla organisation has released a preview of its redesigned website which should make it easier to locate its various Internet software offerings and to find information about them. The organisation developes the Mozilla software suite - comprising a Web browser, email client and chat client - as well as the Firebird and Camino browsers, the Thunderbird email client and the Bugzilla 'enterprise-grade' bug tracking software. The new website can be seen at website-beta. ...more

BT cuts off broadband users in ISP dispute

BT has cut off around 5,500 broadband users because their ISP failed to pay its bill. Customers of Euro1Net, which is operated by Advanced Data Services, who attempted to access the Internet this week were redirected to a holding page explaining that, 'BT Wholesale has stopped providing a service to Advanced Data Services, due to the non-payment of invoices.' BT added that it is working to ensure that Euro1Net customers are able to order a new broadband service as soon as possible, a process should be completed by 5 September, leaving them offline for a fortnight. ...more

Critical vulnerability revealed in Real Players

A highly critical security vulnerability has been discovered in Real Players and other Real Networks' software. A boundary error in the processing of WAV and SMIL could allow the execution of malicious code. The vulnerability can be exploited by a specially written WAV or SMIL file to cause a buffer overflow and enable arbitrary code to be run. ...more